Tommy Lopez: Yorktown alum works with gadgets and starlet

Mar. 20, 2007

Written by

Joe Lombardi

The Journal News

As a split end-turned-quarterback who helped transform Yorktown's varsity football team into an eventual two-time state champion, Tommy Lopez was a player who could adapt to just about any situation, according to his coach, Ron Santavicca.

So it should come as no surprise that Lopez was able to use that ability while serving as a police officer and SWAT team member in Boca Raton, Fla.

Lopez, who graduated from Yorktown in 1991 (two years before the Cornhuskers won their first state title), has helped to change the way law enforcement and other public-safety agencies do their jobs. He's one of three founders of a company, Advanced Public Safety, that provides mobile and handheld software that increases both efficiency and safety.

Two years after forming the company in 2003, Lopez and his partners sold it to California-based Trimble Navigation for around $20 million, Lopez said. He remains employed with the company as a sales manager.

"When I became a cop in 2000, a lot of agencies put computers in cars, but five or six screens would come back and it was a challenge to digest the info while driving on the road," Lopez said. "But the voice-response system reads the data back to you. With laptop computers in the car, you can type in a license-plate number and then listen to the response. It will tell you if a car is stolen, for example."

The 33-year-old Lopez, who lives in Fort Lauderdale with his wife, Amanda, and three children ranging in age from 4 months to 11 years, moved to Florida because, he said, "he needed a change of scenery." He had been working in private security in Westchester from 1996-2000. Now that he's left the police force, he eventually hopes to start his own private security company.

In the meantime, Lopez continues to provide personal security for celebrities, something he started doing before he moved to Florida.

Last month, Jennifer Lopez enlisted his services.

"My job is to keep fans and press away," Lopez said. "Basically that's all it is."

But that job can often prove to be a challenge, as he discovered one recent New Year's Eve when he worked for Madonna, who was at Miami's South Beach.

"Fans just wanted to touch her," Lopez said. "I can remember this girl at a nightclub. When she realized it was Madonna, she just freaked out."

The security detail for such celebrities usually includes a driver. Lopez said his shifts can easily wind up being 10 hours or more. During that time, however, there's little interaction with the celebrities.

"You don't really talk to them," he said.

Even though Lopez's Yorktown football career ended 17 years ago, Santavicca still talks about the impact he had.

"After my first year (1987), we had very low numbers, so we brought up seven sophomores who all played varsity for three years: Tommy, Andy Shein, Roy Colsey, Henry Wiethake, Rocco D'Andraia, Jason Foley and Ousmane Greene," Santavicca said. "We called them 'The Magnificent Seven.' If they didn't come up, we wouldn't have fielded a program."

Their senior year featured a couple of epic battles against Ossining - one for the league title and the other in the premier Section 1 bowl game. Yorktown lost both, but Lopez, who was all-section in both football and baseball, will never forget the teams' regular-season meeting at Yorktown, won by Ossining 14-12.

"I just remember before the game, looking up and seeing all those people," said Lopez, who went on to play slotback at American International, from where he graduated in 1996 with a degree in criminal justice. "There were thousands of them."